tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-95738970217731354.post8095897765714647356..comments2023-12-28T02:52:31.067-08:00Comments on Went 2 the Bridge: Private-Public Partnerships All Over Threaten Earth, Home of the 99%Lisa Savagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06319699936783253064noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-95738970217731354.post-44893909290990469042012-09-08T10:47:24.453-07:002012-09-08T10:47:24.453-07:00You've scratched on a good point. Not just th...You've scratched on a good point. Not just the public (who says that?) but the economists don't know much about economics, and so don't know deal with the idea of human freedom in practical terms--merely as a slogan.<br />Here's how I see it. Drop talk about monopoly (you've probably seen the graphs showing a monopoly's power to set price above the rational level and output below it) and go to the heart of legal understanding. The law is a repository of wisdom worked out over centuries, like the idea of civil rights, so that, when we do away with chunks of law, like the idea of our soldiers being supposed to take prisoners, we all feel the drop in the ambient wisdom. The law on big economic activities is to regulate them. If you act like a public function, you are regulated like one. Public functions are by definition monopolies.<br />Take schools. If you run a private school, you still have to educate to public standards. The obvious monopoly, which obviously belongs to the public, is not the classroom or the teacher, but the setting of educational standars. Weights and measures are set by the public. We don't want competing systems out there.<br />So if three car companies constitute eighty percent of US car manufacturing (just a guess), that tells us that, in the current economic and technological world, we're very close to having an analogue to railroads or telephones: the car companies should be regulated and, in return, guaranteed a profit. That's called the regulatory bargain for public utilities.<br />Can corruption enter into that bargain? Sure, why not, but the difference, like ever in law, is that it's done more openly and is judged by standards that are spelled out more carefully.<br />So, absolutely right, "public-private-partnership" is a contradiction in terms on purpose. Very suspicious sounding. Practically a scam in plain sight. Like "global war on terror".chrisrushlauhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11432949074147807503noreply@blogger.com